eG Enterprise addresses the key needs for Citrix XenDesktop monitoring and end-to-end performance management. Using eG Enterprise during your initial Citrix VDI deployments helps you quickly identify and eliminate bottlenecks. When a user calls your helpdesk saying that the virtual desktop service is slow or is not working, eG Enterprise is a unified XenDesktop monitor to help you to quickly determine the cause of performance issues, anywhere across your entire infrastructure. Is it the network? Database? Applications? Virtual desktop? Virtualization platform? Storage?

eG Innovations provides the best value for the money coupling visibility and excellent reporting. Using their automatic root cause analysis we avoided throwing $$ at the problem and realized $20K in savings - immediately.

Rob Salmon

CEO, Office Port

eG Enterprise makes discovering the cause of slowdowns as easy as a single mouse-click.

Using a patented, automated root-cause diagnosis technology, the eG Enterprise analyzes performance across every tier of the infrastructure and correlates them over time. The result is a prioritized set of alerts with the most critical one pointing to the root cause of a problem. By focusing on the most critical alerts, eG Enterprise for Citrix XenDesktop ensures that you are working on the root cause of your problems and are not distracted by the effects of the problems.

As you start to scale your virtual desktop infrastructure, eG Enterprise helps you with resource optimization and capacity planning. Using the wealth of metrics that it collects, you can determine where the hot spots in your infrastructure are, how you can balance load across your servers to maximize usage, and where you need to add resources to ensure that the quality of service does not suffer as you roll out additional virtual desktops.

Key Features

Total Performance Visibility Across the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Monitor every layer, every tier of the Citrix XenDesktop service end-to-end so you know what is working and what is not.

Performance Insights into User Sessions and Applications In-depth visibility inside each user's session so you know who the top users are and what applications they are using.

Proactive Detection and Resolution of Performance Issues Auto-baseline your virtual desktop infrastructure; Get proactive alerts when your infrastructure usage and performance are abnormal. Automatically correlate across metrics from different tiers to identify and fix issues before users call.

Moving XenDesktops from Pilot to Successful Production

Figure 1 below depicts the different XenDesktop adoption stages. Most often, during the early stages, the virtual desktop infrastructure is over provisioned because the emphasis is not on return on investment.

The different stages in adoption of Citrix XenDesktop technology

Following the success of the Citrix VDI pilot, when an organization moves to production rollouts, that is when the emphasis shifts to making Citrix XenDesktop work in the real world. Return on investment and server sizing as well as end-user experience and productivity become important criteria at this stage. Users expect virtual desktops to perform at least as well as physical desktops; if not, they want their physical desktops back!

Performance Management must be considered early on in any Citrix XenDesktop deployment

Performance management must be considered early on in any XenDesktop deployment. Typically, once the deployment is underway and users start calling about slowness, this is when performance monitoring, reporting and root-cause diagnosis get attention. The admin needs to know quickly: Where is the bottleneck? Is the slowdown due to capacity? Or due to one user or application over-using resources? Has the workload has changed?

Making problem diagnosis harder is the fact that different tiers of the infrastructure are managed by different teams and each of these teams may be using a different toolset to monitor their tier. After the problem is finally isolated, it may be too difficult to fix an issue (because the Citrix XenDesktop architecture is already in place) or the remedial action may entail significant changes to the existing architecture, making the problem resolution process lengthy and expensive.

End-to-End Citrix XenDesktop Performance Management is Critical

The following key considerations have to be taken into account when considering what technologies are required for performance management of Citrix XenDesktop technology:

Monitor users, not just VMs: Virtual desktops are hosted on virtual machines. In a virtual desktop infrastructure, the workload of a VM is dependent on which user is logged into that VM and what applications he/she is using, so it is important for XenDesktop success that administrators monitor users and user activity, and not just the VMs.

Monitor activity inside the desktop: Although an "outside" view of a VM provides an indicator of the level of activity of a VM, it does not provide additional details regarding why a specific VM is taking up excessive resources. In-depth monitoring is required to determine which process could be responsible for the increased workload of a VM is critical for effective problem diagnosis and for ensuring peak performance.

Monitor the XenDesktop service end-to-end: While the virtualization platform and the virtual desktops are key components of the XenDesktop infrastructure, the performance of the virtual desktop service is also dependent on all the other infrastructure applications and network devices that function together to enable the service. To successfully monitor a XenDesktop implementation, at a minimum you need to monitor all of the components that are involved in the delivery of a desktop with applications to the end user - the XenDesktop Delivery Controller (the connection broker), virtualization platform, storage, Active Directory, profile and provisioning servers, etc.

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Why eG? One Monitor to Manage All of IT.

eG Enterprise is the only single pane-of-glass, virtualization-aware, auto-diagnostic IT infrastructure performance monitor

“eG Innovations provides the best value for the money coupling visibility and excellent reporting. Using their automatic root cause analysis we avoided throwing $$ at the problem and realized $20K in savings - immediately.”

Rob Salmon

CEO, Office Port

“With eG Innovations, we are reducing system maintenance and support costs, avoiding incremental IT spending and eliminating system downtime across the hospital. Performance and prediction reports help us optimize IT spending and save $100,000 per year.”

Peter Bakker

Manager, ICT GHZ

“eG Innovations delivers a robust, reliable and extremely valuable solution to deliver maximum uptime and user satisfaction. Pre-emptive alerting helps us to address performance issues immediately before they affect system and application availability.”